Do you never, ever truly question your religious beliefs -- rather than just accepting them because you were probably raised in an environment where they were drilled into you repeatedly over a period of years and years starting from infancy when your mind was like a sponge, ready to absorb and accept anything, all without your consent?
.
I always question the pragmatics/ consequence of belief, whether political or religious. I don't disregard truth altogether, I just think I am more than a logical machine. And so I ask what is the Good Life... in the sense of the full development of all spheres of existence, and then look for a harmony or a hierarchy of sorts between them. In this view of things, belief becomes 'triangulated' between such things as truth, goodness, and unity.
Looking at the American political scene at the moment, you can't help but see a disaster unfolding where mass politics has been reduced to ideology. The opposing parties completely talk past each other. Tolerance, based on a belief in reason, is breaking down to be replaced by power.
Though of course 'religion' can also produce fanatics [witness the more radical of the religious right], it can also help to distance ourselves from subscribing to simplistic formulas... or from drowning ourselves in a sea of technology.
It distances ourselves, at the personal and pragmatic level, by not taking this life too seriously, nor by seeing it as meaningless. It also serves to siphon off excess energy to a transcendent realm [the sublimation of art?]. Ideally, if we believe ourselves to be moral/ rational creatures with a destination, this should foster a civility toward our fellow travelers.
Of course, religion is also responsible for a great deal of violence. But then the interpretation of this differs depending on your view of origins. If the order of civilization was originally hard won from a violent chaos, that is one thing. If religion only served to repress our original freedom, as fancied by French philosophy, then that is quite another.
Maybe there needs to be some state of orthodoxy, a belief which unifies men into a culture, by which they can then freely speculate and tolerate all opinions. For those opinions would be just that... akin to conceptual art. Our problem today is we are seeing tolerance fall apart due to a lack of some orthodoxy, whether secular or religious. The Left represents the old liberal modern idea, the Right represents the 'post' modern, and the twain never meet. The forces of religion, culture and history may serve to broaden our imaginative experience and get beyond dry logical dichotomies.
